


Nor Destroyed

by Bright_Elen



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Descriptions of state violence, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV R2-D2, Robot Feels, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-10 23:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17435366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: R2, Luke, and Chirrut all have things to mourn, but maybe they also have ways to keep going.





	Nor Destroyed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SassySnowperson (DramaticEntrance)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DramaticEntrance/gifts).



> Content warnings in endnotes.

When the Falcon landed on the hospital frigate, a team of medics whisked Luke off to surgery, medi-droids escorted the other organics to examinations, and the administrative officer sent C-3PO to the command ship and R2 to the carrier cruiser.

Well. She _ordered_ R2 to the carrier. What actually happened was that R2 beeped acquiescence and then trundled off to a secluded wall terminal so he could stay abreast of Luke’s treatment. Moving around enough to stay unnoticed was going to be a bit difficult on a medical ship that didn’t see too many astromechs, but maybe that was a good thing. R2 had always preferred action to contemplation, and there would undoubtedly be long stretches of time between updates on Luke.

He tried not to dwell on the last time he’d been waiting in a medical facility.

There were microphones in all of the consultation rooms, so that the doctors wouldn’t have to write anything down (or maybe so none of the record-keepers would have to deal with the doctors failing to write things down). It was easy enough to slice into the system and eavesdrop until he found Luke. R2 listened as the nurses and medi-droids prepared Luke for surgery, as he was floated to the operating room, as he was sedated and the procedure began.

Luke was being repaired. He was going to be fine, physically. But R2 was far too familiar with the fact that humans were deeply emotional creatures. Padme and Anakin...

With a twist of his dome, R2 cut off that process and retreated into a store room to avoid a patient being wheeled down the corridor. Emotionally speaking, Luke was very little like Anakin. If anything, R2 saw his brooding and anger in Leia, but she was far more controlled than her father ever was. He didn't need to worry about history repeating itself.

In the end, the procedure lasted ten hours, forty-three minutes. Then R2 waited another three hours for Luke to wake up, twenty-six minutes for the doctors to meet with Luke, and only then could he finally sneak into Luke’s room.

“Artoo!” Luke’s voice was rough, but still bright. “It’s great to see you, but are you even supposed to be here?”

«Does it matter?» R2 trilled. «I wasn’t about to leave you.»

Luke’s breathing hitched he leaned forward to put his organic hand on R2’s dome. “Thanks, buddy.”

R2 hummed affectionately. «How are you feeling?»

Luke sighed. “I mean, fine, I guess. My wrist hurts off and on.” He shrugged. “But...well.”

After a moment, R2 prompted him. «Well what?»

Luke looked at R2 and said nothing. R2 had facial recognition software — he had to be able to  identify his pilot among a crowd of humans in the same flight suit and helmet — but it worked by focusing on bone structure and completely ignoring the positioning of mobile facial features. So whatever expression Luke was making, R2 couldn’t use it to determine his feelings.

«Luke?» R2 tried again.

Luke shook himself, then rubbed R2’s dome. “This...I kind of don’t want to tell you, because it’s probably going to upset you.”

R2 beeped in exasperation. «You’d damn well better tell me now.»

Luke huffed, his hand slid off, and his shoulders hunched inwards. “Ben lied to me.” He looked back at R2. “To both of us.”

R2 wasn’t at all surprised. Obi-Wan always had done as he thought best without consulting others. «About what?»

“About my father,” Luke’s voice hitched. “He said Darth Vader killed my father.”

R2’s processors whirred at the possibilities. Before he could even settle on the most likely, Luke opened his mouth again.

“Vader _is_ my father,” Luke whispered harshly. “He said so himself, and Artoo...I felt it. _He_ wasn’t lying. Somehow Anakin Skywalker became Vader.” He scrubbed at his face, then held up his new hand, wrist wrapped in bandages. “My own father did this to me.”

«No,» R2 said. «No!» But it all made horrible sense. Anakin had been so angry near the end, so out of control. He shook his dome back and forth, rolled farther away from Luke.

It had taken so long for R2 to put those times behind him. Because the typical method of handling droid emotions was a memory wipe, there had been no help for R2 to cope with his grief. It had taken months to figure out how to properly archive his memory files so that he knew what had happened but wasn’t forced to relive those terrible events. Years of being suddenly plunged into distress when his grief, triggered by key words or situations, overran his careful partitions.

And all along, he’d been mourning the wrong thing.

His circuits couldn’t fully contain his anguish and he had to let out a low, long wail and drive in circles.

“Artoo?”

R2 didn’t respond. Anakin was alive. Anakin was _alive_ and R2 couldn’t do anything about it and his processors were only producing anger and sadness and the pain of loss, the emotions running over and amplifying each other in a feedback loop that threatened to overload his central core.

“Hey,” Luke said, and he was suddenly closer, blocking R2’s path. “Hey, Artoo, buddy,” and a warm hand was on R2’s dome, and Luke was crouching down to look R2 in the optic. “It’s awful, isn’t it? It’s so karking terrible.” And then he was leaning forward, embracing R2, and R2 couldn’t move anymore so he leaned into Luke instead, humming his grief. Luke started shaking, and then he was crying, arms tight around R2’s chassis, and R2 let himself shudder with his own grief.

«Anakin wanted to protect people,» R2 said. His optic was obscured by Luke’s hair, not that he could really process visual data at the moment. «He did so much stupid shit protecting people. But he’s been doing the opposite for twenty-two years?!»

“I know,” Luke said, and his voice was harsh and heavy with tears. “How much damage has he done? And I keep thinking,” he said, getting the words out between sobs, “why did he turn? What made him like that? Could it have been any other way?”

«I don’t know,» R2 said. «I don’t have enough information. I don’t know if Anakin becoming Vader was the position of the star or the trajectory of the hyperjump. Either way, I hate it, and—»  He faltered, because R2 knew that humans placed extreme significance on their parentage, but then, Anakin had been his friend, his partner. The only one, until Luke, who’d cared what R2 thought. He had as much right to his feelings as Luke did. «Either way, it would have been better if he really had died!»

“No,” Luke shook his head. “No, Artoo, don’t say that! There’s still some good in him. There’s still hope.”

R2 pulled back out of Luke’s reach. «It’s not even worth calculating the odds of getting him back!»

Tears still streaming down his face, Luke stood up. He didn’t move towards R2 again. “It’s not always about the odds.”

«You can’t jump without calculations!» R2 screeched, his speakers out of control, and then he turned and left.

* * *

There was a conference room, just off the main hangar bay, for when the tech crews needed to hash things out around a table. No one was using it at the moment, and it had the added attraction of a large viewport, so R2 sliced the door to let himself in. Then he spent the next one hundred and fourteen minutes looking out at the rest of the Rebel fleet. For the moment, all was quiet, the blink of indicator lights in harmony with the endless backdrop of stars.

If only his processors could be as peaceful.

The door opened behind R2. “Hello.”

R2 swiveled his dome to look. It was Luke’s teacher.

He swiveled his dome back, hoping Chirrut would get the hint.

He didn’t. R2 heard his staff tapping against the deck, never coming into contact with any obstacles despite the numerous chairs. He approached R2 deliberately, stopping just outside the weapon’s range.

“Lovely view.”

«You’re not as funny as you think you are,» R2 retorted. He wasn’t in the mood for games.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” he said, lowering himself onto one of the conference chairs, still  hanging onto the staff with both hands once seated. “I’m simply relaying what I’ve heard from various sources.”

«What do you want?» R2 said, already tired of the conversation.

“Luke told me you were struggling.”

Rolling back half a meter, R2 beeped in frustration. «No. Yes. Maybe.» He let out a descending note. «Yes.» He swiveled his dome back enough to look sideways at Chirrut. «Did he tell you why?»

“He told me why he was struggling,” Chirrut said, “and that you had also known Anakin Skywalker.”

R2 backed towards the corner of the room. «I _thought_ I knew him.»

“You don’t know who he is now,” Chirrut said. “The past is a different matter.”

«Is it?» R2 said. «He’s killed an unknown but undoubtedly high number of sentients. Enslaved, or helped to enslave, many more, but when I knew him, he hated slavers more than anything else.» R2 launched into motion, servos humming with extra power as he veered around the table, pivoted before reaching Chirrut’s seat, and then repeated the process in the opposite direction.

Chirrut remained where he was, still facing the viewport he couldn’t see. R2 made another circuit, only slightly less overclocked than before.

“Before the Empire closed the Temple,” Chirrut said as R2 approached him again, “they defiled it.”

R2 stopped.

When training Luke, Chirrut often spoke of a seemingly unrelated topic to guide Luke into approaching an idea from a different direction. At the moment R2 definitely understood Luke’s frustration with the method. But amid all his other feelings, the processes for that frustration weren’t strong enough to compete for computing cycles, and soon ended.

What really mattered, though, was that Chirrut’s voice and body language were even harder to read than Luke’s. R2 resorted to his index of Basic, found the connotations of Chirrut’s words, and decided that it was probably appropriate to say, «That’s terrible.»

“Yes,” Chirrut said simply. “They waited until the middle of prayer, brought in twenty prisoners, lined them up against the Wall of Crystals, and shot them.”

R2 recoiled. «Maker.»

Chirrut nodded. “They knew what they were doing. If they had only closed it, the pilgrimages would have continued. We Guardians would have protected it to our last breath. But defiled,” Chirrut said, and then, to R2’s surprise, reached up to wipe moisture from his eyes, “there was no point. Most of the pilgrims stopped coming. Jedhans worshipped at one of the smaller temples, or prayed at home, or—” Chirrut stopped. Swallowed. Breathed a few breaths without speaking, and then, he resumed. “Or, like Baze, simply stopped any practice at all.”

Quietly, R2 rolled closer and reached out with his manipulating arm to rest it on Chirrut’s knee.

Chirrut covered R2’s pincer with his hand. “Thank you. I have not talked about this for a very long time.”

R2 hummed in acknowledgement, even if he still wasn’t sure why Chirrut had brought it up. Clearly he needed to talk about it.

“I chose to worship at a neighborhood temple,” Chirrut continued. “I didn’t pray at home unless Baze was out. But I hated the small temple because it wasn’t the Temple of the Kyber.” He sighed. “I was angry at the wrong thing. But eventually I realized that the Temple had been of the Force, but the Force was not the Temple.” He released tension in his chest and shoulders, took a deep breath, and said, “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. Wherever I am. And that is how I carry on.”

R2 shifted his weight from leg to leg. «I’m happy for you, but does it have anything to do with Anakin?»

Chirrut moved his hand to R2’s dome. “Anakin’s fall is a great loss,” he said, voice quieter now, “But the things that he cared about have continued. We all fight for the same things your Anakin fought for.” He tapped R2. “ _You_ are alive, and because of you, so is Luke.”

R2’s processors whirred. Before he could come to any conclusions, Chirrut was standing up and moving to the door again.

“Thank you for the talk, my friend.”

Chirrut was already in the corridor by the time R2 managed a «Likewise.»

* * *

The next morning, R2 monitored the microphone feeds until Luke was alone in his room. When he rolled in, Luke looked up and, for the first time since they’d met, hesitated.

R2 felt that as a pang in his motivator. «Good morning, Luke.»

Luke nodded, tense. “Morning.”

R2 hung back for a moment, and then gathered his determination and rolled up to Luke’s bedside.

«I’m sorry I upset you yesterday,» R2 said.

Luke’s face did something, and then he put his organic hand on R2’s dome. “Yesterday’s dust, buddy. I probably could have handled that better myself.”

A low background static that R2 hadn’t even really registered was suddenly gone from his circuits. Feeling much better, R2 gently nudged Luke’s hand in acknowledgement.

«I still think it’s a terrible idea to try to get him back,» he said.

Luke slid down the bed to be closer to R2’s optic level. “I have to try, Artoo.”

R2 burbled. «I know. That’s why I’m going with you. Your chances of survival increase dramatically with help.»

Luke’s breathing changed again. “Thank you.”

«You’ve been with me since Tatooine,» R2 said. «So I’m going with you.»

With both hands, this time, Luke patted R2’s dome.

«Even when you go to really stupid places.».

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: descriptions of state violence (specifically sacrilege and public execution)


End file.
